It is advisable to use container classes of the STL so that you don’t have to go through the pain of writing the entire code for handling collisions, making sure its working well, testing it repeatedly with an overhead of time consumption.

Suppose you have some data that has values associated with strings and its fields consist of grades> in this situation you can directly use hash table instead of having it created by yourself.

A class is said to be a container class which is utilized for the purpose of holding objects in memory or persistent media. A generic class plays a role of generic holder. A container class is a good blend of predefined behavior and an interface that is well known. The purpose of container class is to hide the topology for the purpose of objects list maintenance in memory. A container class is known as heterogeneous container, when it contains a set of different objects. A container class is known as homogeneous container when it contains a set of similar objects.

Function prototyping is a function declaration statement that tells the compiler about the return type of the function and the number as well as type of arguments required by the function at the time of calling it.

Syntax:

return_type function_name( type1 arg1, type 2 arg2, ... );

Advantages of function prototype :

- It helps the compiler in determining whether a function is called correctly or not. Each time when a function is called, its calling statement is compared with its prototype. In case of any mismatch, compiler reports an error.

- A function must be defined before calling it. But prototyping allows a function to be called before defining it.

When amount of memory to be allocated is known beforehand i.e. at the the time of compilation, it is known as Static Memory Allocation. Once the memory is allocated statically, it cannot be deallocated during program run. So it leads to wastage of storage space.

Example:

int A[100];

When amount of memory to be allocated is not known beforehand, rather it is determined at the time of program run, it is called Dynamic Memory Allocation. It leads to efficient utilization of storage space.